Part of the mystique of adolescence is that it’s the time in life when most of us play, at least a little, with identity. As a child, the people and the world around you tell you what you are. And you believe them, because what else can you do? You’re at their mercy. Of course you believe them. Your survival depends on it.
As you begin to mature into an adult, your own understanding of who you are begins to ask for recognition. To demand it, even — first from you yourself, then from the external world. I am my own person. I have agency. This is who I am. Love me. Or at least accept me. Or at least tolerate me. From fashion and makeup to music and politics, adolescence is a period of trying on new aspects of identity and seeing what fits. And, because evolution is the law, no group of adolescents is content with the options already available. Always, there’s a push to reinvent. To go one step further. To create. To bring forth something new. To make new options.
Many people get stuck in their adolescence. Not in adolescence itself — in their adolescence. They’re listening to the same music in their 30s and 40s (and 80s) that they loved when they were 15. They’re suckers for anything nostalgic from the era when they “came of age”; whole industries pop up trotting out particular slices of the past. Teens are not the only (maybe not even the primary) audience for films and shows about teens, high school, and adolescence.
It’s easy for adolescence to become the singular period of transformation, given how it’s awash in physical change, in brain development and maturation, and in particular hormonal sea changes that, for most of us, won’t be replicated. But we allow this natural biological bias to solidify a myth into the illusion of truth: that whoever we are by the time we come out of puberty, high school, and college is who we are and will be.
The only other time in our culture that comes close to adolescence in offering opportunities for self-discovery and reinvention is when we fall in love. Which is why that time, too, holds such appeal and fascination. When someone discovers us through the process of falling in love, it’s an opportunity for us to meet ourselves all over again, through someone else’s flattering gaze. We highlight who we want to be, who we wish we were, who we are trying to become, and even the parts of ourselves we haven’t been able to bring into the light before, hoping that in this moment, in front of love, they’ll be lovable. In the process of choosing which self we bring to our lover, we change ourselves.
But what we should consider is that transformation of self and reexamination of identity do not need to be limited to adolescence or to the rare occasions when we fall in love. They are options that remain open to us at all times.
Who am I? Who do I wish to be? How many people have I been? How many people am I now, in this singular moment? I am not monolithic; I contain multitudes. Different people bring out different parts of me; who I enjoy being around says something about who I am, and about who I want to be. I enjoy being around others not only for who they are, but for who I am with them.
When we are not used to it, when we are out of practice, change is scary. We instinctively know that once we start on the path of questioning, doubt, curiosity, transformation, and transfiguration, we cannot go back. In taking that first step, we leave behind forever the ability to return to what was. We may return — but that place will not be the same, because we will not be the same. Every time we choose change, that choice itself irrevocably makes us a different person. And this is terrifying.
But the law of existence is change, is evolution, is metamorphosis. Nothing stays the same, no matter how hard you hold onto it. The only question is what your role will be in this change. Will you fight it, clawing desperately, vainly trying to clutch the moving target of the status quo and what’s already past? Or will you step into the stream, knowing it will not be the same stream ever again, nor you the same person? Will you own your agency, choosing to play, choosing to use however much free will you have to shape who you become?
